


Ugly memories in third person

by AgapantoBlu



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Hush, DC Extended Universe, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bitter ending, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Rape Aftermath, This story places Batman: Hush in a continuity where Talia drugged Bruce to conceive Damian, be careful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 01:41:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20301352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: Then. An off-handed sentence and a crack between the pools, liquid of one sliding into the other. Contamination.[...]It’s just that Damian said it so casually, so nonchalantly, in the mixture of so many other things, and Bruce didn’t see it coming. The lead up, retrospectively, had been obvious. It was his fault for not realizing the path their discussion was taking, and just assuming his son would be like any other child his age, unassuming and sheltered from the dark spots of life like Damian had never been instead.“Cover your drink.”[Damian's words have consequences and Bruce's mind is not the bomb-proofed system of boxes and compartments he forces himself to believe it is.]





	Ugly memories in third person

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, Damian giving Bruce The Talk about Selina was fun to me up until the moment he said "Cover your drink". I've been wondering whether it was just an offhanded wave of the writers at the continuities in which Talia drugged Bruce or if it was supposed to mean that this is how things went in that universe and Damian knows. In the end I just wondered how it must have felt for Bruce to hear such words, all considered. So yeah, I didn't like that piece of dialogue in the movie at all and I'm petty so I wrote a tiny thing with no real resolution at the end to deal with it.
> 
> Nothing is explicitly detailed, but I still marked the story as Mature for the themes and because it's mostly from Bruce's POV.
> 
> Should go without saying, but "Don't Like, Don't Read" is the Golden Rule here.

  


Compartmentalizing is easy, after so long. The Batman, a tool for darkness and violence; Brucie, a tool for sparkles and high society intricacies; the real Bruce Wayne, in a box under a sheet, dust settled all over, waiting for something. What belonged to one never to spill out into another, everything packed nicely like a game of Tetris with maniacal precision, pieces side by side never truly touching. 

Then. An off-handed sentence and a crack between the pools, liquid of one sliding into the other. Contamination.

By all accounts, it’s a flaw, he’d never deny it. He needs to admit it to work on it, make it better, impede the situation from repeating itself. Against most people’s opinion, his greatest critic is still himself.

It’s just that Damian said it so casually, so nonchalantly, in the mixture of so many other things, and Bruce didn’t see it coming. The lead up, retrospectively, had been obvious. It was his fault for not realizing the path their discussion was taking, and just assuming his son would be like any other child his age, unassuming and sheltered from the dark spots of life like Damian had never been instead.

“_Cover your drink._”

It had been years since he’d last been so distracted, so _distraught_, as to almost miss something while driving, and it was an whole car this time. He’d barely hit the brakes in time. He wonders if Damian noticed.

He wonders if Damian knows.

Selina is waiting for him, but the picture of her is no longer the warm alluring silhouette he’d been eager to catch at their booked table, the body he’d imagined curling around his, coiled wired muscle under the feminine layer of softness that disguised her steel core better than her mask ever did her face. Now, that strength paints numbers and statistics by her frame, cold tints her skin with the barest shade of blue, like frozen lips, and her past—

He tells himself Selina could not be further from Talia, but that’s hardly reassuring. Selina was a thief and she’s going straight, now, he thinks, but his brain is a computer of microscopic precision and it burns his retinas with memories of her holding him down, of her whip around his wrists or neck, of her kisses disguising evasive plans. 

Of Talia, so beautiful and majestic, the first time he saw her. The way the green dress framed her, the impression of richness from the gold in the embroidery and in her hair and on the hilt of her dagger. Her strength, her teasing, her oh-so-rare smiles that alone made his time with the Al Ghul bearable. She used to dance at the League’s banquets, but only then. He’d seen her do it once alone and he could remember every bend, every fold, every tendon, of her body as she did so, transfixing in every conceivable way.

He doesn’t remember what happened next. That’s probably what haunts him the most; knowing what had been done to him like a rumor relied at a later time, his own history lived in third person. The horror of what had hit him, he used to think would be easier to face if only he could remember for himself; if only he could calculate, replay, go forward and backward as he tried to pinpoint the moment he’d made his mistake, the moment he’d_ allowed_ it to happen.

He parks the car quite seven blocks still from the restaurant.

This, he knows, is not a good way to think about it. Allowing, mistake, lack of agency; he’s framing himself as the true responsible of what happened, because admitting otherwise would mean accepting the situation had been out of his control, and little scares him more than losing control. He’d been dealing with victims ever since he’d started his Mission, but he never quite managed to apply the treatment he reserved to them to his own case.

The bow-tie is choking him, so he tries to widen it, then he pulls more and more and more and the thing snaps open. He watches it fall tiredly in his lap.

He remembers waking up. Realizing. Demanding answers. The light in her eyes as she spoke of ruling the world and a soldier child, a soldier _son_, to lead it. He hadn’t put his heart in the story of such a heir, too busy staring at the glass and letting the words reframe the novel he’d tried to write for himself.

He was supposed to be the hero, not the victim. Coming to the Al Ghul—

Honestly, what had he expected? From the League of Assassin? He should have known better.

Selina. He tries to force his thoughts back on her, tries to reframe her in the context he’s known her too well into. A thief, yes, a criminal, of course, but never this. Selina would never cross this line, Bruce would swear on it.

The ignition key has long since stopped dangling, empty of all kinetic motion. The car isn’t going to start if he doesn’t turn it on, that’s for sure, but his arms weight tons and lay somewhere beside him though he wouldn’t be able to properly indicate _where_ if asked. His mouth tastes bad, acid, and every smell in the car, the careful scent of clean and pristine, makes him gag. He can tell every food he’ll try to touch tonight will be just like cinders shoved down his throat. 

Selina, his brain repeats, but the green eyes in his mind are too calculating to be hers. A cat’s, no; much more of a tiger’s, a lioness’. 

The last time he’s felt like a prey he’d been eight and staring up at the barrel of a gun. The other times he’s been crushed, he hadn’t seen it coming as clearly, didn’t have the time to feel the fear mounting. That night, he hadn’t felt anything at all. Nothing, like he hadn’t been there at all, like it wasn't happening to him.

_Toc toc._

He doesn’t flinch because his body is in a box and his brain in another, and whatever tumult can be taking place in the latter can only translate as stillness in the first. His head does turn, though, and there they are, the _right_ green eyes, sparkling, wild in the way a kitten longing for a game can be, hunting only as play-pretend.

Selina tilts her head to the side. Through the window, her voice is muffled. “Are you going to keep me waiting much longer, Mr Wayne?”

For a moment, he checks around himself, but, no, he’s still very much far away from the restaurant. The clock marks him half an hour late now, though, and he guesses she must have either grown tired of waiting or just making a point for the future occasions.

After all, dating Bruce Wayne is an hard deal, all Gotham magazines agree on that. A few claim it’s part of his charm, more claim it’s his never-to-disappear vice. A few of the harshest called him in need of a strong woman to _put him in his place._

He wonders of which mind is Selina Kyle.

Unlocking the door is the first logical step so he does it, but it is Selina who has to pull it open for he is just standing there, staring at the handle. He is trying to remember when the past has last managed to shook him like this. He’s never been good at grieving or dealing, shoving under the carpet or making a mausoleum out of it are the only two ways he’s ever learnt to handle his pain. The lethargic feeling taking over his limbs is a new symptom he is afraid to confront the source of.

Selina pushes his shoulder lightly. “Get out or scoot over, big guy,” she says, voice unexpectedly gentle. “You’re not driving us anywhere in this state.”

The way he obeys her feels mechanical, a series of pulling and pushing of muscles and weight toward a goal, and when he is finally sitting on the passenger seat he wouldn’t be able to tell which way he did it. Selina turns the car on with remarkable familiarity and pulls them out of his hazarded park to slide gracefully into the traffic stream of Gotham’s evening. She doesn’t ask where to take him, but the way she blinks the turning lights on and how smoothly she switches lanes indicates she has a very specific destination in mind.

So he lets her.

The screen for the video call is blessedly dark now, but Bruce stares at it and keeps replaying Damian’s message in a loop. _Cover your drink_, Damian repeats. _Cover your drink, Father. Cover your drink. _

_Cover your drink._

Why didn’t he cover his drink? 

“You still with me?”

He lifts his eyes to Selina with immeasurable fatigue. To think he’d managed to stay stoic through Alfred’s silent approval, Dick’s teasing, Damian’s cutting words, just to feel so utterly crashed in front of the very woman he’d been longing to go out with. 

(A part of his brain had a very specific reason as to why this morally-ambiguous sensual woman with a clear interest in him would be the very person he feels the most vulnerable around. He shoves it deep into the dark.)

He makes some sort of sound that shouldn’t count as an answer, but Selina is just that good at interpreting his grunts and she just hums in return. “Thought so,” she says, but she doesn’t mention what.

They pass the city borders. She’s hitting on the gas more and more the further they get from the center. He shifts his weight in the seat.

“I’m not kidnapping you for a ransom, Bruce, relax.” Her grip on the steering wheel is loose, slides as she accompanies it to the turns, and it’d be easy to rip it out of her control, give an harsh pull and send them both out of the road. After that, he’d had to hope she’d gotten the worst of injuries between the two of them, or that his aren’t severe enough to impede him in a fight, and then he could take her. He could keep her bay long enough to send a distress beacon, or to hide in the shadows and make his way slowly to the closest safe-house, which, by mental calculations, should be five blocks to the north and seven to the west of their current location. Not too close if he’s in bad shape, but not so far that it’d be unthinkable.

They don’t get out of Gotham. Right of the edge of the city, so close Bruce can make out the road sign that indicates the end of its ground, they park right under a neon sign with fuzzy cracked letters.

_Cat’s Tongue_, it says. Or, well, _C-t’s To-gue_, without the missing letters. They’re yellow and the main window has darkened glass and pages of newspaper to impede sight from the outside. The entrance door is four steps under the street level, and Selina is already climbing them. 

She turns to send him a look, a brow arched questioningly, and somehow Bruce joins her. It is, once again, a motion followed out of motor memory and barely anything else. He’s not sure they even locked the car, wonders whether he should be more worried.

It has the feeling of hearing Alfred’s steps down the corridors of the boarding school after five hours of waiting in the dean’s office. If on one hand it meant a stern lecture and possibly some punishment was forthcoming, it also meant the torture of waiting for it, anxiety scratching at his chest to be let out, was over.

He shivers as he logically picks the thought apart, observing it from all angles, under a magnifying lens, with a microscope, tinkering with it with tweezers and chemical solutions, and all to reach the conclusion that it is, indeed, _bad_. When he tries to imagine a box big enough to shove it all in, close and bury it somewhere in his mind to never be looked at, he finds himself lacking a big enough container. 

Selina pushes the door open and a bell chimes out of tune. The pub has a thin layer of smoke hanging on the ceiling, and old wood for pavement. The counter seems to be the best kept piece of furniture, but it’s hard to tell surrounded by old stools, a few with less than the proper four legs, and all the chipped and bent tables. There’s a jukebox in a corner buzzing menacingly and playing a song with the same static as the car radio in the middle of a tunnel. Someone is playing pool in a secondary room beside the counter, and losing badly from the sound of it.

She takes over a stool to a end of the counter and waves the bartender down. The burly man approaches her with a dirty dishtowel on his shoulder and something akin to fear in his eyes. “Two shots of your cheapest tequila.”

She turns to Bruce when she finds him just standing beside her, and pats on the stool beside hers to prompt him to sit down. He does. “I don’t condone waste of good alcohol,” she says, conversationally. “If you’re just going to drink yourself into a coma without even savoring it, what’s the point on using the special reserve for it?”

Bruce doesn’t reply. He thinks of the few times he’d grabbed a bottle for the mere purpose of jugging it down like water, mouthful after mouthful with no mind to spare for the taste, and he finds himself unable to recall the label. Regardless, it had come from the cabinet in his father’s study and nothing in there costed less than three hundred dollars. 

The bartender places the shot in front of them. Selina pushes one in his direction and raises hers. “To oblivion,” she cheers, effortlessly at ease with whatever expression Bruce has been wearing the whole time, and she chugs her alcohol down. She grimaces, probably at the taste rather than the alcohol, and puts the glass back down.

Bruce steals a look at his.

He’d seen the bartender pour it and he’d carefully watched Selina’s motions as she moved it closer, he knows no sleight of hand could have taken place during those few instances, yet when he tries to raise it the glass trembles slightly. When he realizes it’s his hand actually shaking, he slams both down on the counter a bit too harshly. They thump lowly and his shoulders stiffen.

Displays of weakness invite predators, and cats like to play with their food. 

Selina doesn’t have her usual playful expression on, though. If anything, she’s staring at Bruce’s glass as well with an arched brow. “Pretty sure that wasn’t for the cheapness,” she murmurs. Her voice doesn’t carry the same velvet tune of her night persona, nor the dangerous edge of when someone touches her things. Bruce struggles to recognize it. This kind of things, it’s not how they do it usually. The Bat and the Cat are both dangerous and sharp-edged, black shapes barely visible into the night. With the bar lights flickering above their heads, Bruce is open and Selina is soft, and neither knows what to make of it. “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Not really.

He keeps staring at the liquid. The bartender seemed to be familiar enough with Selina that he knew she was to be feared; and scared men could be persuaded into doing many things, Bruce knew it well, he made his whole mask under such assumption. What if the drink had been ready for him? What if the poison was in the glass? What if it was in the bottle but she’d taken the antidote before meeting him? What if—

He spills a couple drops. He frowns at them on the wood.

“Dude, are you—”

“Leave the bottle, Jack. And give me another, _sealed._”

When Bruce looks up, Jack is hurriedly placing a second bottle on the counter. He makes a beeline for the opposite end of the counter immediately after, and Selina glares at him the whole time until she’s certain he’s too terrified to try and mind their business.

Bruce watches her pick up his glass and throw that down as well, then she pushes the sealed bottle toward him. “We can do without the glasses, tonight,” she mutters, pensive, before cradling the open one to her own side.

Bruce blinks. His fingers when he lifts them from the counter have stopped trembling, finally, but he doesn’t trust them to hold steady so he busies them with touching the seal of his bottle. It is, indeed, still integer.

He checks for syringe punctures in the cap.

“You know, I thought it was just your usual paranoid-self acting. World’s Greatest Detective, thirty years on the job in the worst cesspool of a city on Earth, used to see evil everywhere, unable to ever stop. A professional bias, if you want.” Selina takes down a mouthful and her throat bobs around the burning liquid. The bottle looks too small and too fast-emptying to match her rhythm. “I guess there was some shard of naivety left in me after all, wasn’t it?” She shakes her head. “All the years I've known you. You never drink anything you haven’t poured for yourself from a sealed bottle.”

Bruce stares at her. 

Does he? He tries to think about it, but it takes him a moment to see the pattern she so easily observed. Truth is, he can recall more than an occasion in which the practice had been a conscious decision, a logical strategy to follow when surrounded by suspects or business partners — sometimes both the very same people — or when one of his kids was out on patrol alone and he wanted to be lucid in case he needed to intervene or when he was supposed to keep available for Justice League duty. He cannot say, though, that he’d realized this behavior of his had poured into other occasions as well. He tells himself surely he’d drunk something offered to him, maybe by Diana or Clark or Dick or Tim or—

Oh.

Selina is still staring at him. Whatever she sees happing on his face makes her nostrils flare open for a second and her breath stutter stiffly. Anger is not as familiar a look on her as seduction, but it’s still easily recognizable. Bruce watches it and tries to ignore how seeing Selina angry at him makes him feel less uneasy that having her stare at him with open romantic desire from above a drink.

Her mood changes faster than her whip cuts the air, though. Another drink, another deep breath. She looks at the array of bottles in front of her with a calculative look, though it’s a toss up whether she’s considering drinking them all, smashing everything in a fit of rage or something completely different and utterly uncorrelated with the colored glasses and liquors, but maybe somehow connected with another woman, another pair of green eyes, another time buried in the sand of the desert.

Which is crazy. Selina doesn’t know of Talia. She cannot, nobody knows.

Except Damian, maybe. Perhaps. _Please, no_.

“You’re not going to tell me what happened, are you?” she asks, but she doesn’t look at him and it doesn’t sound like a real question anyway. More like an affirmation, a scientifically sound fact with tons of evidence to its claim. “You’re not going to a say a single word. God help us if you deal with shit as Bruce. Should I get you a cape?” 

Her one-way conversations seem to be enough for her, and she’s also horrifically right in her predictions, so Bruce doesn’t answer. Doesn’t say a single word. He’s not totally in the Bat’s mindset, but it’s a close enough thing. He’s been monitoring the entrance and the bartender and all the patrons and every millimeter of Selina’s every movement this whole time, he realizes. He still really doesn’t want to drink from _this _bottle, but he could use a drink from one of those at home.

Selina looks older tonight, in the way he sometimes feels after a particularly heavy mission or whenever a member of his family is lying on a cot in the infirmary of the cave. Her eyes are jade survived through the millennia and her lips have clenched on so many words they’d turned to stone, stalactites and stalagmites sealing them closed.

Bruce is not sure how he looks himself. He’s not sure he’s here at all, whether he exists or has only half attended this date while the rest of him is still stuck waiting in the car. There’s an inch distance between where his skin ends and where the world begins, and in that space sometimes there are bubbles of thoughts and memories and colors that he struggles to cut through.

Selina’s hand moves to a discreet pocket in her dress. Bruce hates that his eyes train on it and his shoulders tense and his brain recollects the five best way to get her to loosen her grip on whatever she’s fetching and which antidotes he has stashed in tonight’s suit and car.

It’s fucked up that he cannot get himself to move to stop her, even knowing how to. That he’s as still and waiting as a virgin strapped to an altar.

A virgin, as if.

Selina puts on the counter what looks like a black and white disk half a third of an inch thick. Bruce looks at it and sees there’s a tape rolled-up inside, with an opening to pull a strip out, and an easy legend on top to discern _positive_ from _negative._

_I don’t need it_, he wants to say, but he finds out his mouth is shut from disuse as well. His throat hurts with the unsaid lie.

“It only works for GHB and derivates as it is,” Selina says. “I’m sure you can work on a better formula that could pinpoint all kind of drugs. Assuming you’re unwillingly to ask someone for help, of course.” When Bruce doesn’t answer yet again, she clicks her tongue. “Hate to break the news to you, though: this isn’t going to go away on its own if you just ignore it hard enough.”

_Watch me,_ he thinks and he doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, but he’s up and leaving as the words still echo in his brain.

Selina doesn’t follow him and he doesn’t take his bottle along.

He texts his driver to go wait for her and take her home later, though.

_ Cover your drink. _

It’s unarguably the first rule of safety. He’d been certain to teach it to all his sons and daughters, regardlessly; and though they’d called him either overprotective or openminded he’d never been able to shake the nagging question of whether he’d paid so much attention that his boys would be on guard from sexual assaults as well had he not experienced first-hand how statistics and stereotypes spare nobody’s skin.

He empties a bottle of whisky and deliberates moving onto the vodka before Alfred walks into the studio. His faithful friend, his family, looks at him lying face up on the moquette, suit on but jacket and necktie off, too early and yet too late in the night, utterly lost, eerily silent.

Alfred walks in and gently shuts the door at his back.

Why, Bruce wonders, has he never told Alfred? Alfred would have understood, would have helped; but he would have also insisted that he asked for help, and maybe that’s why he didn’t tell him. Alfred’s disappointed look when Damian had showed up, _I’m not mad, I just would have expected a more responsible conduct on your part, Master Bruce_, had hurt less than the knowledge of what speaking the words into existence would have done to his life.

Talia’s assault had been so long ago. He’d successfully avoided its memory by steering clear of every restaurant using even just a vaguely similar combination of spices as the cooks in Nanda Parbat, shoving himself so deep in his Mission sometimes he forgot to resurface for air, focusing on his kids and his city and the Justice League project more than on himself, and _apparently_ never drinking from open bottles. There had been no reason to admit to the truth then, Damian well past his eleventh birthday.

(And there had also been the fear. The totalizing terror that he would bleed himself dry to say those words out and his family would not believe him, because how convenient? That he never mentioned it before but now he claimed such a story when there was a child to provide for and responsibilities for a juvenile and irresponsible conduct to take? And, come on, you’ve never acted fearful of Talia before, anyway.)

(Batman has no reason to fear Talia. Batman has risen from the ashes of worse enemies and worse injuries, more than once, and he is strong and calculating and the World’s Greatest Detective and he doesn’t fall for such by-the-book tactics.)

(Bruce has feared Talia. Bruce fears Talia still, but only sometimes and only when he is alone and only when there are no other monsters to distract him at night except for his own.)

Alfred stops by his side, face as polished as ever. “I take it the date with Miss Kyle didn’t go well?”

How to describe it? A shitfuck. A trainwreck. A molotov cocktail of bad memories, trauma and parallels. 

He shakes his head.

“I see.”

Neither says anything for a long time. Bruce thinks of Damian, who must have noticed he returned because Damian is just like him and notices everything, but who also has yet to show himself. Maybe he doesn't know what his words have done to his father, he’s only guessing what could have happened and he doesn’t want to see too much of it. Or m aybe, and Bruce is terrified of this option, he knew exactly what was going to happen and his desire to keep his father from dating another woman had just trampled over everything else, every ounce of respect and every thought of care.

He tells himself Damian admitted to Talia not being a good woman in general, much less a good woman for Bruce, so he must not be hoping for a reunion for his parents, but the doubt remains in his brain, eating every other thought away.

“Master Bruce,” Alfred calls, _again_ by the tone of his voice. “Let us just get you to bed for tonight, shall we?”

A bed is the last place he wants to be right now, especially one as big and as full of silk as his, but he cannot find his voice to deny and he cannot find the strength to worry Alfred even more because he knows it would lead to a prodding that would eventually bring the truth to light. He gets up, he follows, he gets undressed, all out of the mere necessity to keep Alfred from asking. Tomorrow, if he can postpone the interrogation that much, he’ll surely be able to come up with a story, deflections and lies masterfully mixed to the point he himself won’t be able to tell what had truly happened.

Alfred turns the lights off with a low, _goodnight_, and Bruce stays still. 

He usually sleeps on his side, but he’s stuck supine facing the ceiling, heavy weight, limbs locked, the feeling of another body awfully warm on his, hands touching, all over, everywhere, mouth running on his skin, words bouncing on the walls but nobody coming to check. The accent, the scent, the numbness. He loses consciousness the way he did back then, just much, much later.

He wakes up choking, gasping for air, with her scent still in his nose.

Damian is eating breakfast and feeding scraps to Titus under the table when he thinks Alfred is not looking.

It’s such a normal child-like action Bruce stills on the door of the kitchen to watch it happen once or twice, as long as he can before the butler puts a stop to the game with an arched brow and then beacons him to sit at his place.

“Good morning, Father,” Damian greets easily, voice normal, expression open.

Bruce can’t help it: he wonders whether his son is being honest or his mother just trained him so well in the art of lying, of hurting people one night and smiling at them the morning after.

He hates himself for that thought. Damian is only _thirteen_.

“Eggs and bacon, Master Bruce?”

“Sounds perfect, Alfred,” he says. His voice is a bit rough, but he decides he can play it up to morning sleepiness. “Good morning, Damian.”

“You returned early last night,” his son claims. It’s not exactly an accuse, but almost so and it’s just a bit relieving. Damian wouldn’t be so mad about his date with Selina ending early if he’d said what he did with the willing purpose to sabotage it. _Or he’s lying again._ “Did the criminal steal your car and left you with the bill?”

Damian clicks his tongue to end his sentence. Alfred says nothing, but the timing with which he serves the coffee is too convenient not to be suspicious.

A fraction of a second. Bruce pictures a situation in which he admits to most of the truth, a flashback then an episode of some kind then Selina’s attempt at comfort to culminate into his drunkard escapade in the study room, and he recoils heavily from it. 

If Damian knows, he won’t be able to keep it from showing on his face, not if Bruce confronts him so directly about it. It would be proof of the lengths Damian is willing to go for his own goals, the actions of his mother he’s willing to oversee out of loyalty or maybe disinterest, the coldness toward such a situation. Perhaps an admission, even, that he sees the stain on his father’s reputations as such a strong and unflinching and devoid of weaknesses man.

If Damian doesn’t know, he’ll find out because he’ll hear Bruce’s words and never rest until he deciphers them. And what of him, then? What of the carefully crafted story he built around himself as the hero, the blood soon, the long-awaited one, if he realizes what happens to his father when he’s reminded of the night he was conceived?

“We missed our reservation, a trouble with the car,” he lies. The hypocrisy of every shade of this conversation is not lost on him. “Selina knew a place and we went there instead, but the mood was rather spoiled by the time we arrived. We went home shortly after.”

No point kicking the bottom of the lake when it’s just going to bring up mud.

**Author's Note:**

> I like the Talia from the earliest stories, but the most recent version of her character is undoubtedly cruel and has hurt Bruce in many ways.
> 
> It's a toss up whether I'll write more to expand on this because I have an awful track record with letting stories have a sad/open ending.
> 
> Tumblr: @agapantoblu


End file.
